"A good stock of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one." – Paul Halmos

Posts Tagged ‘generating functions’

Previously I mentioned very briefly Granville’s The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations, which explores an analogy between prime factorizations of integers and cycle decompositions of permutations. Today’s post is a record of the observation that this analogy factors through an analogy to prime factorizations of polynomials over finite fields in the following sense.

Theorem: Let be a prime power, let be a positive integer, and consider the distribution of irreducible factors of degree in a random monic polynomial of degree over . Then, as , this distribution is asymptotically the distribution of cycles of length in a random permutation of elements.

One can even name what this random permutation ought to be: namely, it is the Frobenius map acting on the roots of a random polynomial , whose cycles of length are precisely the factors of degree of .

Combined with our previous result, we conclude that as (with tending to infinity sufficiently quickly relative to ), the distribution of irreducible factors of degree is asymptotically independent Poisson with parameters .

Previously we showed that the distribution of fixed points of a random permutation of elements behaves asymptotically (in the limit as ) like a Poisson random variable with parameter . As it turns out, this generalizes to the following.

Theorem: As , the number of cycles of length of a random permutation of elements are asymptotically independent Poisson with parameters .

This is a fairly strong statement which essentially settles the asymptotic description of short cycles in random permutations.

Previously we described all finite-dimensional random algebras with faithful states. In this post we will describe states on the infinite-dimensional -algebra . Along the way we will run into and connect some beautiful and classical mathematical objects.

A brief update. I’ve been at Cambridge for the last week or so now, and lectures have finally started. I am, tentatively, taking the following Part II classes:

Riemann Surfaces

Topics in Analysis Probability and Measure

Graph Theory

Linear Analysis (Functional Analysis)

Logic and Set Theory

I will also attempt to sit in on Part III Algebraic Number Theory, and I will also be self-studying Part II Number Theory and Galois Theory for the Tripos.

As far as this blog goes, my current plan is to blog about interesting topics which come up in my lectures and self-study, partly as a study tool and partly because there are a few big theorems I’d like to get around to understanding this year and some of the material in my lectures will be useful for those theorems.

Today I’d like to blog about something completely different. Here is a fun trick the first half of which I learned somewhere on MO. Recall that the Abel-Ruffini theorem states that the roots of a general quintic polynomial cannot in general be written down in terms of radicals. However, it is known that it is possible to solve general quintics if in addition to radicals one allows Bring radicals. To state this result in a form which will be particularly convenient for the following post, this is equivalent to being able to solve a quintic of the form

for in terms of . It just so happens that a particular branch of the above function has a particularly nice Taylor series; in fact, the branch analytic in a neighborhood of the origin is given by

.

This should remind you of the well-known fact that the generating function for the Catalan numbers satisfies . In fact, there is a really nice combinatorial proof of the following general fact: the generating function satisfies

be a graded representation of , i.e. a functor from to the category of graded vector spaces with each piece finite-dimensional. Thus acts on each graded piece individually, each of which is an ordinary finite-dimensional representation. We want to define a character associated to a graded representation, but if a character is to have any hope of uniquely describing a representation it must contain information about the character on every finite-dimensional piece simultaneously. The natural definition here is the graded trace

.

In particular, the graded trace of the identity is the graded dimension or Hilbert series of .

Classically a case of particular interest is when for some fixed representation , since is the symmetric algebra (in particular, commutative ring) of polynomial functions on invariant under . In the nicest cases (for example when is finite), is finitely generated, hence Noetherian, and is a variety which describes the quotient .

In a previous post we discussed instead the case where for some fixed representation , hence is the tensor algebra of functions on . I thought it might be interesting to discuss some generalities about these graded representations, so that’s what we’ll be doing today.

One of my favorite results in algebraic combinatorics is a surprisingly useful lemma which allows a combinatorial interpretation of the determinant of certain integer matrices. One of its more popular uses is to prove an equivalence between three other definitions of the Schur functions (none of which I have given yet), but I find its other applications equally endearing.

Let be a locally finite directed acyclic graph, i.e. it has a not necessarily finite vertex set with finitely many edges between each pair of vertices such that no collection of edges forms a cycle. For example, could be with edges and , which we’ll denote the acyclic plane. Assign a weight to each edge and assign to a path the product of the weights of its edges. Given two vertices let denote the sum of the weights of the paths from to . Hence even if there are infinitely many such paths this sum is well-defined formally, and if there are only finitely many paths between two vertices then setting each weight to gives a well-defined non-negative integer.

Let and be a collection of vertices called sources and vertices called sinks. We are interested in -tuples of paths, hereafter to be referred to as -paths, sending each source to a distinct sink. Let be the matrix such that . Then the permanent of counts the number of -paths, but this is not interesting as permanents are hard to compute.

A -path is called non-intersecting if none of the paths that make it up share a vertex; in particular, each is sent to distinct . A non-intersecting path determines a permutation of the vertices; let the sign of a non-intersecting -path be the sign of this permutation.

Lemma (Lindström, Gessel-Viennot): is the signed sum of the weights of all non-intersecting -paths.

Corollary: If the only possible permutation is (i.e. is non-permutable), then is the sum of the weights of all non-intersecting -paths.